6. Philosophers Reveal the Truth about Truth and Reality

A very brief history of western philosophy - Part 1: Plato to Kant

“Philosophy is as old as recorded history and gnarled with the scabs of its ongoing internal conflicts. It is as deep and as tall as the mind can reach. Yet it is also young, even juvenile, in how little of its self-acclaimed potential it has fulfilled, and in how much it stands to learn. It is also old and weary, dying a slow partial death, its heaviest sections withering into unsightly insignificance. ” — an anonymous 20th century philosopher

When people try to figure out what to believe and explain why they do, they don’t spend much time thinking about the fundamental nature of truth, knowledge, or reality. Yet, if you take any belief and keep asking “why?”—keep drilling down for the reasons behind the reasons, you eventually get to the sorts of questions philosophers struggle with. Most of us have neither the time, the interest, or the mental stamina and precision to chase these questions to their ultimate ends. But in certain situations it becomes important to be as certain and as meticulous as one can be in explaining or proving a belief, as in building a bridge, condemning a suspected murderer, deciding which drug to prescribe, or designing the logic of a mission-critical computer model.

One step in assuring a solid conclusion is to start with the most accurate information available. A more subtle determiner of validity involves examining the rules used in the reasoning processes to draw conclusions from the information at hand. That job has traditionally been filled by philosophers. Its not a job most of us would want. Rational beliefs (conclusions that one can give reasons for having) are drawn based on premises or assumptions, so there are basically two problems to work out: The first is how to avoid the infinite regress of challenging the premises (forever asking “why?”) by identifying some fundamental assumptions that all would agree are true. The second is, as mentioned above, how to ensure that the reasoning process guarantees a true conclusion as one steps from premises through intermediate conclusions along the way to the main assertion.

Here are some of the questions classical philosophers have struggled with:

• What is real? What is true? What can we know (what is the nature and limits of knowledge)?
• Is the reality of the world different from how we perceive and experience it in our minds? Does physical reality exist apart from the human mind?
• When something changes or transforms (ages, melts, divides, etc.) it is still essentially the same thing; is its identity preserved?
• Can consciousness (or ideas, or spirit) exist without the body, outside the physical world? Can pure thought have an impact on physical reality (or vice versa)? Is there anything other than physical reality?
• Does everything that happens have to have a cause? Is everything that happens predetermined? Is there free will?
• Can science discover the ultimate nature of realty? Can pure reason (or even intuition) tell us anything about the ultimate nature of reality?

I will reveal the answers to the questions a little later, but for now, it is surprising how many pages have been written and how many lives dedicated to these questions–how many true geniuses have wracked their brains and engaged in prolonged theoretical battles over them–given that we now, finally, have the answers to all of them.

Lets do a bit of a whirlwind tour of some of the central questions, brawls really, of classical western philosophy. Stepping into the ring are well known celebrities such as Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes, and many others whom you may remember from your college philosophy class, including Lock, Hume, and Kant. The contenders are seen as having been members of several schools (clubs or gangs) of thought, including idealism, materialism, empiricism, rationalism, and skepticism (BTW, philosophers are not restricted to being in only one gang).

Plato was an Idealist, who claimed that the world of ideas, for example the ideal nature or essence of a tree or a circle or a color, was more fundamental, more “real,” than physical reality, and that physical reality, a tree for instance, comes into being as an imperfect instance of the ideal. Plotinus, a staunch defender of Plato against Plato’s rivals and misinterpreters, had a more mystical bent, and believed that matter was a manifestation of something deeper and more ethereal. His Platonic philosophy argued that spirit creates the world by stepping from eternity into time and form.

Aristotle was Plato’s student and chief critic. He said “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth”—ouch! Aristotle was quintessentially practical, none of that invisible eternal spiritual formless essence stuff for him. He worked out some of the basic rules for logic and the scientific method that are still respected today.

Other appreciators of the world of sensation and physical experiences, the Empiricist “I’ll believe it if I see it” team, followed in Aristotle’s footsteps. John Locke, of “tabla rasa” fame, said that the mind starts out without any knowledge and everything one knows is built up from experience through the senses. Bishop George Berkeley one-upped Locke by claiming that things not perceived through the senses can not logically be said to exist at all. His contemporaries assumed that this lead the nonsensical conclusion that the “real” world is an illusion, and, though they could not refute the logic of his theory, rejected it outright.

Scotsman David Hume (who taunted Berkeley by saying that he “often astounds, but rarely can convince”), not to be outdone by an Irishman, brought the Empiricist linage to its skeptical extreme, and, some thought, brought all of philosophy down with it. It would seem that there is virtually no knowledge that we can rationally justify with certainty. We can’t be certain that the cup exists in the just-closed cupboard (we can’t see it now), nor that the sun will continue to rise in the East (just because it always has).

All this was a slap in the face to Idealists, especially Descartes, the “I think therefore I am” guy on the Rationalist team, who pointed out that sensations and experience are famously fallible, so it is pure reason, not the senses, that must form the basis of Truth. For example, what about mathematics? Isn’t that fact that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees True regardless of whether anyone ever saw or even thought about one? Some things are undeniably and eternally true, showing truths that come straight from a pure realm of mind and reason, regardless of the messy, transient world of dirt, blood, and ash.

But alas, reason has its flaws too. Regular old human reasoning, even by the purportedly brilliant, is just not to be trusted, because, heck, reasoning is what lead to all those prior conclusions by other philosophers that each philosopher is arguing against. So we must look for some more formal method of reasoning, such as logic or mathematics. Without going into the details, philosophers since the time of Aristotle have tried so hard, so very hard, to develop systems of logic that would hold up, that would be able to guarantee the truth of some usable knowledge, but each attempt was shot down, its weaknesses and loopholes revealed by the next guy to enter the ring.

So, if we can’t, along with the Empiricists, rely on experience and the seemingly obvious facts presented to our senses, and we can’t, with the Rationalists, rely on pure reason, that equally obvious conviction that C follows incontrovertibly from A and B, where then can we find Truth? The only source left is divine inspiration or intuitively revealed truth. And, all along the historical trail, many were the philosophers who had to lean upon assumptions about God or eternal divine reality to make their case. Long after Plotinus’s mystical pronouncements (he was influenced by Eastern Philosophers), the Bishop Berkley, who had to admit that reality sure did seem to exist even when you are not looking at it, claimed that reality exists because God is always looking at it all. As you might imagine, theories relying on divine metaphysical essence or beings were pretty easy pickin’s for any Rationalist or Empiricists who wanted to take a shot.

Immanuel Kant entered the ring as the Great Referee and Mediator. Kant was a highly respected up-and-coming young philosopher who studied and commented on the eminent thinkers before him. But at the age of 46 he ran into the work of the skeptic David Hume like a brick wall, which, as he put it “awoke me from my dogmatic slumber.” Reeling from Hume’s implications, which threatened to toss all that he had written thus far into irrelevance, Kant entered into a scholarly silence for an entire decade.

He emerged with a key insight: that in order to make sense of the perennial philosophical questions one has to step back and look at the mind itself, to see the mind as a tool; to look at how thought is structured and limited; to be weary of how our concepts influence our conclusions. He is like the first fish who said “hey, I just realized there is this thing I will call Water…” One fascinating question, which I will take up in another essay, is why it took so long, until 1781, for Western Philosophy to generate this perspective. From this starting point Kant developed a body of work, highly regarded to this day, that synthesized earlier views. He affirmed the Empiricist preoccupation with sense experience and the material world, but reconciled this with the Rationalist tradition by noting that experience itself is made possible only through deeper underlying (”a-priori”) mental structures (deeper than concepts or ideas) such as space, time, and mathematical forms like numbers and shapes, that exist regardless of what exists in the material word.

Starting with these insights Kant wrote several classic treatises and thought he had nailed it for once and for all, forcing a “revolution” in thought¹ that allowed philosophers to stop squabbling about these fundamental questions and move on to more practical, and even sublime, work. But no. So sorry. Though in some sense he is still seen as reaching some form of pinnacle in Western philosophy, clarifying a host of prior disputes, Kant’s key insight opened up a Pandora’s box that would, over a couple hundred years, bring all of philosophy to its knees, whimpering in despair and confusion, and, in keeping with tradition, fragmented into a profusion of squabbling camps.

(See Essay 8 where I apologize (sort of) for running rough-shod over these brilliant men in the above caricaturizations.)

I know I told you that I would reveal the answers to the list of perennial philosophical questions. And even though at this point in the story it looks like there may be none, I assure you that the answers do exist. But I must sign off here and continue in the next essay, which will include those answers and looks inside the pandoras box that Kant cracked open.

1. This was before the term “paradigm shift” was popular, else he surely would have used it. [↩]